Bulls remain butts of joke

K.C. JohnsonTribune staff reporter

Did you hear the one about the NBA team that started a stretch of six of seven home games Friday night at the United Center, a prime opportunity to make up lost ground and turn negative headlines into positive ones?

"I've been addressing a lot of things with the team lately, and that wasn't real high on the list of things that I had to talk about," Jim Boylan said.

Tongue firmly in cheek, rim shot nailed, the Bulls coach and his players tried to use humor to shift the emphasis from off-the-court controversy to on-the-court action.

But the Warriors were in no laughing mood and didn't cooperate.

Playing their first home game since Joakim Noah made daily headlines for all the wrong reasons on a recently concluded 2-2 trip, the Bulls blew a 14-point lead and fell 119-111 to high-octane Golden State.

At 7-11, the Bulls, who again played without Kirk Hinrich, already have more home losses than they did all of last season.

"Always when the game is tight at the end, we lose control and don't play well," Andres Nocioni said. "The season is not going well. Everything is looking bad now."

With the game tied 104-104, Nocioni watched a Baron Davis miss bounce near the out-of-bounds line and then inexplicably tipped the ball backward. Matt Barnes laid in the gift with one second on the shot clock, and the Warriors never trailed again.

"I don't know what I did," Nocioni said.

Nocioni, who scored 28 points in 30 minutes, followed with a forced three-point miss, and Barnes split a pair of free throws.

The Bulls pulled within 109-108 on two free throws by Ben Gordon, who scored a team-high 29 points. But Davis posted up Chris Duhon and kicked out to a wide-open Stephen Jackson, who drained a killer three-pointer with 46.8 seconds left.

"We have to maintain leads and play with more confidence down the stretch," Boylan said.

Davis, wearing an ensemble of pads and bands that would make a Bears lineman proud, almost single-handedly pulled the Bulls out of a zone defense that worked effectively as the Bulls built a 14-point first-half lead.

Davis scored 19 of his opponent-season-high 40 points in the third, including a United Center-record five three-pointers in the quarter.

"I felt like Jordan out there," Davis said.

If only the Bulls did. They dropped to 0-16 when allowing 100 or more points, and their 18 turnovers and 61 percent free-throw shooting were big reasons.

Such a collapse seemed unlikely when Nocioni had 18 points at halftime, including eight in a 16-3 second-quarter run as the Warriors missed their first 14 shots.

But Davis heated up to score eight points in 59 seconds down the first-half stretch, a harbinger.